[Below
is an excerpt from the autobiography of Eugene Sinowius Kordyban
(1928-1996), transcribed by Mary A. Kordyban. It gives a good
history of Galicia and Ternopil, as he learned it in gymnasium
(Ukrainian school).]

All this was happening before the two World Wars in southwestern part
of Ukraine, called by us Halychyna, with the accent on the last "a,"
but generally better known as Galicia, which had a history much
different from the rest of Ukraine and, for that matter, different from
any country known to man.

Once it was part of Kievan Ukraine, which was a powerful state in the
9th, 10th, and 11th centuries, but eventually, under continuous
pounding from the nomadic tribes and its own internal strife, it fell
apart. Galicia then became an independent state and existed for another
150 years, before being taken over by Poland. The rest of Ukraine
gravitated towards Lithuania and, when Lublin Union brought these two
countries into one kingdom, also came under Poland.

Under Poland, Ukraine suffered. The Polish landlords took over the land
and Ukrainian noblemen, called boyars, found the loss of land and
privileges less tolerable than the loss of nationality and Orthodox
faith and rather quickly became polonized. The Ukrainians became serfs,
property of the landlord.

Galicia, which was under Polish rule considerably longer, was
considerably worse off, being the poorest and least educated part of
Ukraine.

In 1648 the Khmelnytzky uprising against Poland affected Galicia only
mildly and, though some of the battles were fought within its
boundaries and many a Galician joined Khmelnytzky's Cossacks, when a
treaty with Poland was signed, the autonomy was given only to Central
Ukraine; Galicia was excluded. Eventually, Eastern Ukraine fell
under the domination of Russian Tsars, but Galicia continued to be part
of Poland.

And then there was the matter of religion. The Ukrainians had
been Orthodox, subject to the Patriarch of Constantinople and as such
suffered considerable persecution from the Catholic Poles. In
1596 a group of Ukrainian bishops signed a union with Rome retaining
practically all of the rites and customs of the Orthodox Church and
became known as the Uniates. Union was not accepted by all and
much internal strife resulted. Eventually, most of Ukraine west
of the Dnieper river, which was under Polish domination, became Uniate.

In the late 1700's came the partitions of Poland and, rather suddenly,
Galicia, after centuries of Polish domination, found itself in the
realm of the Austro-Hungarian Habsburg Monarchy.

This was a tremendous change. Habsburgs became interested in
these strange, poor people who were Catholics, yet worshipped God in a
strange way; unlike the Latin in all Roman Catholic churches their Mass
was in Old Slavonic. The Polish, familiar with the history of
this church, and disappointed in the fact it did not become a
polonizing influence, considered them second class Catholics, but
Austrians had no such prejudices. They coined the phrase "Greek -
Catholic" and organized seminaries for the proper training of priests.

Galicians did not call themselves Ukrainians at that time. The
original Kievan Rus' eventually became known as Ukraine, but the
Galicians considered themselves Ruthenians and this name persisted
until the 2Oth century.

Despite of its many shortcomings Austro-Hungarian Monarchy was probably
the most liberal country in Europe at that time and its many
nationalities found life there quite tolerable, especially in view of
the fact of what followed it.Although the official language was German,
local languages were not only tolerated, they were allowed a reasonably
free development. Serfdom was abolished in 1848 and what followed
was a growth of education and culture among the Galician
Ukrainians. The Galicians became acquainted with the free, though
far from perfect, election system and general public education.
Although classes of society still existed and nobility carried with it
certain privileges, the classes were not frozen anymore. A poor
and illiterate peasant found that, by scrimping and starving and
perhaps selling a piece of his land, he was able to send at least one
of his sons through college, so that he could become a lawyer, a
priest, or a doctor and break the invisible bonds of being a "stinking"
peasant.

A new class formed known as "intelligentsia" which began to challenge
the old nobility for leadership of the country. They, in fact,
quickly began to leave the noblemen behind, since the latter were used
to easy living and were more interested in trips abroad than in the
rigors of higher education.

Initially, the peasants' sons, having achieved a higher status in life,
were ashamed of their origins and avoided any connection with their
relatives to the point of even using Polish in their conversations,
since this appeared to be a more noble language. As their numbers
grew, however, enough brave and honest souls were found who realized
that they owed their status to the sacrifices of their peasant
parents. In trying to repay this they turned their efforts
towards betterment of the life of the peasants. The peasants' lot
at that time was not an enviable one, mainly because some 85% of the
population in Galicia were peasants and the land was scarce. Both
in their political and family life the Ukrainians have a flaw which has
always created a problem for them. Both the Ukrainian princes and
peasants considered that, if they had several children, their property
must be divided more or less equally among them.

In the Kievan Rus' this division of the state among the princes, who
were in theory supposed to respect the superiority of the prince of
Kiev contributed in no small measure to the downfall of that state.

In the case of the peasant, the land was divided into small narrow
strips so that eventually a great percentage of the peasants own so
little land that they could barely survive. Furthermore, the land they
owned was not all in one piece, but rather in strips scattered over the
vicinity.

The efforts of the intelligentsia to help the peasants took several
forms. First, by studying the law of the land, they could assure that
the peasants' voting rights and other civil rights were protected.
Secondly, they attempted to improve the farming method and general
education of the peasants. Finally, by organizing farming cooperatives
they tried to assure that the farmers would obtain a fair price for
their product.

It is in this last effort that they ran into conflict with the Jewish
population since they were the ones that controlled the trade. There
was a great deal of Jews in Galicia, very few in the villages, but in
most of the towns and cities the Jews amounted to about 1/3 of the
population. There were quite a few Jewish doctors and lawyers on one
hand, some workers and teamsters on the other end of the spectrum, but
the majority of them were involved in some type of trade. Most of the
stores in our neighborhood were owned by Jews. I particularly remember
two small grocery stores, side by side, owned by brothers Klar. Before
my time this was a larger store owned by their father, but after his
death, the brothers quarreled and split the store in half. This also
split the customers forever and you either frequented one store or the
other, but never both. Over the years the customers developed a
considerable loyalty toward a particular store and it was considered
almost an act of treason to shop even once in the competitor's store.

Many Jews lived in a compact area of our town, but nobody ever used the
word "ghetto." The rest were scattered throughout the town.
There were many nasty remarks made in conversation about the Jews in
general and one could see the words "Beat the Jews" appearing on the
walls, but as far as I knew, nobody ever beat anybody and there were
rather friendly relations between Jews and non-Jews.

When the cooperative movement came, it became of necessity directed
against the Jewish merchants, but again, there was no violence, just
competition. The cooperatives, under the slogan "Buy your own
merchandise from your own"; claimed to have better, fresher and cleaner
products at competitive prices and it made considerable inroads into
the commerce of our city.

Anyway, the Jews were not our main problem. Austrian Empire was
divided into lands, somewhat like states, each with a certain amount of
autonomy. When Austria obtained Galicia during dismemberment of
Poland it also obtained part of Southern Poland which included the city
of Cracow; they combined it all into a land and called it Galizien. It
contained more Poles than Ukrainians and this always created
difficulties for Ukrainians. Most of nineteenth and the beginning of
the twentieth century consisted of continuous struggle against Polish
domination.

At first the Ukrainian language was considered a peasant's talk and the
books by Ukrainian writers were written either in Polish or in old
Slavonic. Then, in the middle of the 19th century a young priest named
Shashkevych published a small book of poems written in the peasants'
tongue. This was almost a heresy and created quite a stir, but it also
opened the floodgates and brought a flowering of Ukrainian literature.
The "Ruthenian" language now became equal to the rest in the Austrian
empire. I am writing Austrian, rather than Austro-Hungarian, because
internally the empire was firmly divided between Austria and Hungary.
While Austria permitted a rather free development of individual
nationalities, there was a great deal of oppression under Hungarian
rule, as in the case of Slovaks and the Ukrainian south of Carpathian
mountains who had the misfortune to belong to that part of the empire.
I was born 10 years after the demise of the Austro-Hungarian empire and
yet I heard so much about it from my parents and people around me that
I almost have a feeling like I actually lived in those times. Just how
free the life was in those days may be shown by this example which my
father used to tell me about. Every larger city had its own
regiment of troops and as the troops marched out daily for their
training outside of town, little boys ran along them chanting to the
beat of the drums: "At Aspen, Wagram, Austerlitz we got our ass kicked
and did not say a word." As one with a knowledge of European
history would recall, those were the major battles in which Austrians
got beaten by Napoleon at the end of the 18th century. Even in
America one would hesitate to mock the marching troops in this
manner. Actually it was forbidden by law to be disrespectful to
the person of Kaiser and his family, but the prime minister and other
members of the parliament were fair game for criticism.

Over a large portion of the last century and well into the First World
War the Kaiser was Franz Joseph I who distinguished himself mainly by
his longevity. He was, however, greatly respected by Galician
peasants, who believed that he loved them dearly and, if there were any
laws that were passed of a disadvantage to the peasants, they said it
was the noblemen advisors that did them. It was told that many a
peasant set out on foot for Vienna to see the Kaiser personally and to
explain to him the suffering of the peasants, but I have heard nothing
of the outcome of such pilgrimages. Kaiser Franz Joseph outlived
his son and closer relatives, so that Ferdinand, a somewhat more
distant relative, became the Crown Prince. He was considered
liberal and friendly to the Ukrainian cause. The Ukrainians hoped
that upon ascension to the throne he would join all Ukrainian
territories under Austria into one land where they would have a clear
majority and would be permitted to develop freely. These hopes
were dashed in 1914 when a Serb, Gavrilo Princip, assassinated
Ferdinand at Sarajevo. What appeared to be at first a primitive
action against Serbia turned into the First World War which brought the
end to the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy and severely brutalized our little
comer of the world.

While the Ukrainians under Austria were permitted a relatively free
cultural and political development, the rest of Ukraine, "Great
Ukraine", as we called it, was under Tsarist Russia and suffered
greatly. The serfdom was not abolished until 1861 and even then
the peasants were still dependent on the landlord. The illiteracy
among them was close to 90%. Still, Ukrainian literature
developed and began to flourish bringing with it the thoughts of
independence. In the latter part of the 19th century, however, a
law was passed which claimed that "there never was, is not now and
never will be such a thing as a Ukrainian language" and forbade
printing any material in this non-existent language. Thus in a
little over one hundred years Galicia, the most backward part of
Ukraine, became the freest and culturally most advanced part.
Piedmont of Ukraine, some called it after a state that united
Italy. The books of authors, forbidden in Russia, were freely
published in Galicia and a number of cultural leaders from the central
Ukraine came to Galicia to work in freedom.

My home town, Ternopil, a city of about 35,000 population is situated
in the northeastern part of Galicia, some 60 km. west of the river
Zbruch which was the boundary between the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy and
the tsarist Russia. Founded by Count Tarnowski in the 1500's it
became an important trading and administrative center. It had to
withstand some Tartar attacks, but generally did not figure prominently
neither in the history of Ukraine, nor that of Poland. During
Austrian occupation Galicia was divided into three major administrative
units with Ternopil being the capital of one of them. With the
coming of the railroads it became also an important railroad
center. Located in the midst of a rich agricultural area it was
also a trading center, but had very little industry. There were
two brick factories, some breweries and flour mills and later a
cigarette paper factory and sugar refinery. The worker population
then was relatively small. Most were clerks, small artisans such
as tailors, shoemakers, blacksmiths and others, there were many
shopkeepers and a number of farmers who usually lived on the outskirts
of town, but still were definitely considered the townspeople.

The old town was surrounded by walls, but these were taken down long
ago and the town spread considerably beyond them. Only such
remainders as Wall Street remained, as well as the appearance of
churches and synagogues near the walls which were used as battlements.

The city's population consisted of almost three equal parts,
Ukrainians, Poles and Jews with the Jewish population slightly larger
than the others. The nationality coincided with religion,
Ukrainians were Greek-Catholic, Polish were Roman Catholic, and, the
Jews, were of course, Jewish. There may have been some German
Lutherans and a few Ukrainian Orthodox, but I never met any.
There also were some Protestant sects whom the general population
considered weird, whispered about their strange religion and called
them baptists, although they probably were not that. The
religious preferences were so strong that they were automatically
identified with nationality, so that a Jew who decided to be baptized,
became a Pole or a Ukrainian depending on the rite he accepted and an
official act of changing from Ukrainian to Polish was to transfer your
vital records from Greek -Catholic to a Roman Catholic office, an act
which became especially significant when Poland occupied Galicia after
the First World War.

Kordyban is basically not a Ukrainian name and I have never met anybody
by that name either among Ukrainians, or among many people of other
nationalities whom I met in my life. My mother called my father
jokingly a gypsy and told me that his grandfather appeared one day from
somewhere with a good deal of money, bought farm land, and settled in
the city. He was somewhat darker than the local population and
had a prominent nose. After becoming integrated into the society
he married a local girl and had several children. One of his sons
emigrated to America sometime near the end of the 19th century, so it
is possible that there are some other Kordybans in this country.
Every time I come to some city I always look through the telephone
book, but I have not discovered them yet.